Hi guys!
As always you guys help me out tremendously. :)
I've finished reading Tizag's PHP tutorial and I've even written a couple of sites that use what I've learned.
It's just that I feel I won't truly learn PHP and be good at it until I do a real project. I have no idea what type of project to do with PHP (I'm new to webdev).
Can you suggest something to get me started and then something I should tackle when I'm better at it, say a week from now?
Thank you.
I find programming puzzles to be infinitely helpful in mastering a language, even if they are largely algorithm-based:
There are quite a few others around the Internet - just search for "programming puzzles".
If your intention is to work on professional projects I highly recommend your project involve database interactions. Updates, deletes, selects and all that good stuff. A lot of beginners do well taking on a blogging engine for this kind of exercise.
Before people start berating me about "every man and his dog writes a blogging engine" Jeff is right. It's a good hello world exercise. Every language will have some open source blog projects in various capacities so it provides a very wide range of hurdles without any lack of references to go to when you get stuck.
Work on your PHP Class usage, along with database handling (MySQLi and prepared statements) and tight integration. Take an existing website and practice adding bits of PHP code to it.
Simple stuff like putting the date or creating a login system can be very rewarding.
Above all you have to play with it. When I was messing with Ruby and Python I ended up writing a google scraper to return plaintext results and store them in a database with a PHP frontend. It taught me a lot about threads, http requests, and database management.
I'd recommend a site with a login/authentication. Further, I would suggest a Bookmark site. One where you can add Links as bookmarks, with notes, and dates. Folders to categorize them, and as stated elsewhere, the ability to Create, Read, Update and Delete both folders and links/bookmarks. This way it can serve a purpose for you after you finish, and also maintain in the future.
Try the example below, but I'm thinking you may not want to get into the AJAX aspect of it unless you already are familiar with JavaScript.